Bright future for Brightpearl?

SaaS start-up Brightpearl hopes that a deal with Google Apps Marketplace later this year will help push it into the big time.

The Bristol-based company, which only launched its integrated contact management, accounting, ecommerce, helpdesk and stock and order management offering commercially in June, already has 250 customers. But it is currently in the process of ramping up operations in a bid to become a second Salesforce.com, which it sees as operating in a complementary market space.

The vendor’s target client base comprises business-to-business product distributors with warehousing facilities that employ between five and 50 staff, although etailers and retailers will likely be next on the list.

This approach contrasts with the focus on 200 or more employee companies chosen by other SaaS vendors such as Netsuite or SAP’s BusinessOne and BrightPearl’s pricing strategy reflects the situation. It charges £20 per user per month after an initial month-long free-of-charge trial period compared with an average of £200 elsewhere.

Existing customers, meanwhile, include the Institute of Physics, guitar parts distributor www.allparts.uk.com and gardening etailer wigglywigglers.co.uk.

Andrew Mulvenna, BrightPearl’s co-founder, said: "For me, the best role model is Salesforce.com and its chief executive Marc Benioff. The company has global reach and, with revenues of $2 billion, it’s ultra-successful, while Benioff, with his various initiatives, is an impressive leader."

As a result, the company "would like to approach Salesforce.com and put together an alliance and it’s on our plans to do", although similar arrangements with other heroes, NetSuite and Sage, are unlikely, he added.

Moreover, although the ultimate aim is to "build a global brand in business software", the firm has already been approached for purchase on a couple of occasions and "would be happy to be an acquisition target" for the right partner, Mulvenna said.

As for the Google deal, the vendor is currently in the process of "preparing our platform for the Google marketplace", which is aimed at small businesses. Mulvenna expects its offering to be listed on the site later this year in a non-revenue sharing and purely promotional arrangement.

Aiming international

But BrightPearl is also looking to expand its business in other ways. Set up in 2007, the firm has already added 20 staff to its books over the last six months, bringing the total to 25. After being purely self-funded, it also obtained $1.5 million in venture capital seed funding from Eden Ventures and Notion Capital, also in June, in order to fund both domestic and international expansion.

While 90% of its customer base is currently located in the UK, the supplier has made ad hoc sales in the US, China, South Africa and Spain, but plans to add multi-lingual and multi-time zone support to its product by next year in order to proactively go after international markets.

It is likewise in the process of hiring both executive and non-executive directors to spearhead and manage such international growth, with an office in the US likely to be first on the target list, followed by others in English-speaking territories at a later date.

Another aim, however, is to grow the indirect channel side of the business, which currently accounts for between 20 and 40% of sales. While 19 business consultants currently resell its offering, the firm plans to launch a targeted channel strategy later this year.